From Blurred Lines to Blurred Law: An Assessment of the Possible Implications of Williams v. Gaye in Copyright Law

In December 2018, panic spread throughout the music industry in light of headlines reporting that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s verdict that the 2013 hit song “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams infringed Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up,” released in 1977. In addition to the tremendous $5.3 million award ordered for the Gaye estate, the Blurred Lines Case resulted in fear that the holding could create precedent for allowing the “style” or “groove” of a song to be considered subject to copyright. Since then, industry insiders, lawyers, and commentators have feared that the decision set precedent for a radical expansion of copyright protection, and thus, a chilling effect on creativity among songwriters. The largely unaddressed question, however, is what does this decision mean for other areas of copyright law? Through a thorough evaluation of the current landscape of copyright law, this note analyzes the possibility of this apparent trend spreading into other areas of copyright, specifically film and motion pictures. Given findings that this trend appears to be contained to the music industry, this note asserts that a disparity of treatment of protected works exists under copyright, and introduces an inquiry as to whether this disparity should exist

A Culture of Control: Progressive Era Eugenics in South Carolina as a Continuation of Created White Supremacy

This work examines the evolution of eugenic ideology in South Carolina during the Progressive Era by following relevant discussions published in The State newspaper. Between 1891 and 1939, The State newspaper provided a platform for discussions about eugenic ideology to be disseminated to the general public. Through eugenics the white portion of the South Carolina population saw a way to retain white supremacy and create better progeny. An examination of The State reveals a network of discussions that reached across South Carolina, the United States, as well as Western Europe. The existence of newspaper articles illustrates cultural integration in the form of organizational support and governmental interactions with eugenics. Into the 1930s, The State also reveals continued support for eugenic practices in the face of Nazi Germany eugenics

Aldh2 is a lineage-specific metabolic gatekeeper in melanocyte stem cells

Melanocyte stem cells (McSCs) in zebrafish serve as an on-demand source of melanocytes during growth and regeneration, but metabolic programs associated with their activation and regenerative processes are not well known. Here, using live imaging coupled with scRNA-sequencing, we discovered that, during regeneration, quiescent McSCs activate a dormant embryonic neural crest transcriptional program followed by an aldehyde dehydrogenase (Aldh) 2 metabolic switch to generate progeny. Unexpectedly, although ALDH2 is well known for its aldehyde-clearing mechanisms, we find that, in regenerating McSCs, Aldh2 activity is required to generate formate – the one-carbon (1C) building block for nucleotide biosynthesis – through formaldehyde metabolism. Consequently, we find that disrupting the 1C cycle with low doses of methotrexate causes melanocyte regeneration defects. In the absence of Aldh2, we find that purines are the metabolic end product sufficient for activated McSCs to generate progeny. Together, our work reveals McSCs undergo a two-step cell state transition during regeneration, and that the reaction products of Aldh2 enzymes have tissue-specific stem cell functions that meet metabolic demands in regeneration

Verifiable Distributed Aggregation Functions

The modern Internet is built on systems that incentivize collection of information about users. In order to minimize privacy loss, it is desirable to prevent these systems from collecting more information than is required for the application. The promise of multi-party computation is that data can be aggregated without revealing individual measurements to the data collector. This work offers a provable security treatment for Verifiable Distributed Aggregation Functions (VDAFs) , a class of multi-party computation protocols being considered for standardization by the IETF. We propose a formal framework for the analysis of VDAFs and apply it to two constructions. The first is Prio3, one of the candidates for standardization. This VDAF is based on the Prio system of Corrigan-Gibbs and Boneh (NSDI 2017). We prove that Prio3 achieves our security goals with only minor changes to the draft. The second construction, called Doplar, is introduced by this paper. Doplar is a round-reduced variant of the Poplar system of Boneh et al. (IEEE S&P 2021), itself a candidate for standardization. The cost of this improvement is a modest increase in overall bandwidth and computation

Pave It or Plant It, 7th - 12th Grade Curriculum

Students will use simple watershed models to measure runoff from natural and urbanized areas. They will graph the data to create and compare the hydrographs of these two different types of watersheds. Students will also map different areas in their neighborhood, calculate the amount of impervious surface in the area, and determine how this affects the volume of stormwater runoff expected from a typical rainstorm. Finally, students will list different types of pollutants that enter the streams from urban areas and learn about possible impacts to the stream. They will also learn about possible methods of reducing these impacts through community or individual actions

Mastic: Private Weighted Heavy-Hitters and Attribute-Based Metrics

Insight into user experience and behavior is critical to the success of large software systems and web services. Yet gaining such insights, while preserving user privacy, is a significant challenge. Recent advancements in multi-party computation have made it practical to compute verifiable aggregates over secret shared data. One important use case for these protocols is heavy hitters, where the servers compute the most popular inputs held by the users without learning the inputs themselves. The Poplar protocol (IEEE S&P 2021) focuses on this use case, but cannot support other aggregation tasks. Another such protocol, Prio (NSDI 2017), supports a wider variety of statistics but is unsuitable for heavy hitters. We introduce Mastic, a flexible protocol for private and verifiable general-purpose statistics based on function secret sharing and zero-knowledge proofs on secret shared data. Mastic is the first to solve the more general problem of weighted heavy-hitters, enabling new use cases, not supported by Prio or Poplar. In addition, Mastic allows grouping general-purpose metrics by user attributes, such as their geographic location or browser version, without sacrificing privacy or incurring high-performance costs, which is a major improvement over Prio. We demonstrate Mastic\u27s benefits with two real-world applications, private network error logging and browser telemetry, and compare our protocol with Prio and Poplar on a wide area network. Overall, we report over one order of magnitude performance improvement over Poplar for heavy hitters and $1.5-2\times$ improvement over Prio for attribute-based metrics

Utah State Flute Studio

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/music_programs/1020/thumbnail.jp

Behavioural and physiological correlates of impulsivity in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)

Impulsivity is a trait related to inhibitory control which is expressed in a range of behaviours. Impulsive individuals show a decreased ability to tolerate delay of reinforcement, and more impulsive behaviour has been linked to decreased levels of serotonin and dopamine in a number of species. In domestic dogs, impulsivity is implicated in problem behaviours that result from a lack of self control, but currently there are no published studies that assess behavioural and physiological measures of impulsivity in relation to this trait. Impulsivity scores were calculated for 41 dogs using an owner-report assessment, the Dog Impulsivity Assessment Scale (DIAS). Twenty-three of these subjects completed an operant choice task based on a delayed reward paradigm, to assess their tolerance to delay of reinforcement. High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) with Fluorometric Detection was used to detect levels of the metabolites of serotonin (5-HIAA) and dopamine (HVA) in the urine of 17 of the subjects. Higher impulsivity scores were found to be significantly correlated with more impulsive behaviour (reduced tolerance to delay of reinforcement) in the behaviour tests and lower levels of urinary 5-HIAA and 5-HIAA/HVA ratio. The results demonstrate convergent validity between impulsivity (as assessed by the DIAS) and behavioural and physiological parameters

Making sense of being at 'high risk' of coronary heart disease within primary prevention

types: Journal ArticleCurrent National Health Service policy advocates screening to identify individuals at 'high risk' of cardio-vascular disease (CHD) in primary care. This article utilizes the work of Radley to explore how 'high risk' of CHD patients make sense of their new risk status. Results are presented here from a nested qualitative study within a quantitative randomized trial of a CHD risk intervention in primary care. 'Discovery' interviews were conducted with 'high risk' participants (n = 38, mean age = 55) two weeks after intervention and thematically analysed. In response to perceived threat, many participants sought to both 'minimize' and 'normalize' their risk status. They also reported intentions to act, particularly concerning dietary change and exercise, although less so for smoking amongst the lower socio-economic status participants. Such perceptions and intentions were contextualized within the life-course of later middle-age, so that both being at risk, and being treated for risk, were normalized as part of growing older. Social position, such as gender and SES, was also implicated. CHD risk interventions should be context-sensitive to the life-course and social position of those who find themselves at 'high risk' of CHD in later middle-age